There is no way to overstate the significance of the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and your performance on it. Not only do your SAT scores demonstrate your intellengence and determine college acceptance, but more dramatically, the outcome of the SAT will, through a snowball effect, dictate your success or failure in life itself. That's right! Score in the high 1500 range, and you are set for life -- money, property, fame ... the sky's the limit. Conversely, a low score on your part portends the difficult times ahead for you. Everything in your life depends on this one test.
Seems ridiculous, doesn't it? It is.
But while there is deserved skepticism in the ability of standardized testing to accurately measure intelligence or aptitude, the SAT is still widely used by colleges and universities as a benchmark of knowledge acquisition in various topic areas. One of these areas is vocabulary.
Seems ridiculous, doesn't it? It is.
But while there is deserved skepticism in the ability of standardized testing to accurately measure intelligence or aptitude, the SAT is still widely used by colleges and universities as a benchmark of knowledge acquisition in various topic areas. One of these areas is vocabulary.
Despite the fact that I used to skip out of my SAT preparation course to go play video games, I was nonetheless apprehensive about the exam and spent some amount of time studying or at least worrying about it. Though I felt confident in both my mathematics and verbal abilities, the vocabulary section seemed daunting. I remember carrying around a book, a small paperback, filled with words and their definitions, and I recall trying to memorize a few words each day, unaware of one simple fact: word lists are no way to learn vocabulary.
Enter The Marino Mission.
Author, Karen B. Chapman, gives students a short novel (200 pages) containing 1,000 of the most common SAT vocabulary words with their definitions footnoted unobtrusively at the bottom of each page. Subtitled, One Girl One Mission One Thousand Words, The Marino Mission greatly diminishes or elimates altogether the need for memorizing vocabulary lists.
Enter The Marino Mission.
Author, Karen B. Chapman, gives students a short novel (200 pages) containing 1,000 of the most common SAT vocabulary words with their definitions footnoted unobtrusively at the bottom of each page. Subtitled, One Girl One Mission One Thousand Words, The Marino Mission greatly diminishes or elimates altogether the need for memorizing vocabulary lists.
The main character of The Marino Mission, Alexa, is a high school student interning at a marine biology station in Central America during the summer of her senior year. There she befriends Jose, a 16-year old Nicaraguan boy and the wild dolphins who fish with him. When Alexa and Jose are led to suspect the biology station of illegally capturing the wild dolphins for testing, a mystery unfolds.
The Marino Mission is not going to win any literary awards this year. The writing is passable, and the plot, while somewhat obvious in its development, moves along at a fair enough pace to hold the reader's attention. But literary merit is not what the author is after.
In The Marino Mission, Karen Chapman has given students a valuable tool, and I highly recommend the book for this purpose. The 200 pages fly by, and in the interim, 1,000 vocabulary words are easily reviewed or acquired. Additionally, the student can test their acquisition of these words with the vocabulary exercises that are included in the back of the book. If only for a quick read the night before the SAT exam, The Marino Mission will be a valuable resource for learning and/or reviewing vocabulary in context.
The Marino Mission is not going to win any literary awards this year. The writing is passable, and the plot, while somewhat obvious in its development, moves along at a fair enough pace to hold the reader's attention. But literary merit is not what the author is after.
In The Marino Mission, Karen Chapman has given students a valuable tool, and I highly recommend the book for this purpose. The 200 pages fly by, and in the interim, 1,000 vocabulary words are easily reviewed or acquired. Additionally, the student can test their acquisition of these words with the vocabulary exercises that are included in the back of the book. If only for a quick read the night before the SAT exam, The Marino Mission will be a valuable resource for learning and/or reviewing vocabulary in context.
